Matthew Knowles Take on Colorism
Different Views of the Same Campus
Mathew Knowles, the father of Beyoncé, Solange, Nixon, and Koi, has written a book, “Racism: From the Eyes of a Child.” The marketing thus far seems to be designed to either dissuade people from reading it or make them so mad they can’t help themselves. Among the highlights are that he “only dated white women or very-high complexioned black women that looked white.” Adding fuel to the fire, he said, “I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was white. Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much in tune with her blackness.”
He went on to describe the two years he attended Fisk University after transferring from a white school and said, “They had a colorism issue there. I was in the last class where they’d take out a brown paper bag, and if you were darker than the bag, you couldn’t get into Fisk.” In the book, he describes “eroticized rage,” in which white women were his way of “getting even or getting back,” at whom I’m not certain.
I knew Mathew Knowles; we played on the same basketball team at Fisk in his Junior year while I was a Freshman. We were not close. On a twelve-man team, there were various cliques based on age, position, playing time, hometown, or just disposition. We were in different fraternities, had different majors, we…
